Data Infrastructure Go-To-Market with Sean Knapp

Every large company generates large amounts of data. Data engineering is the process of storing, transforming, and leveraging that data. Data infrastructure companies provide tools and platforms for performing data engineering.

The last fifteen years has seen a rise in modern data management companies built in a time of decreasing storage costs, an increased volume of data, and the prevalence of cloud computing. Modern data companies include Hadoop vendors, cloud providers, and a wide variety of individual software companies offering products such as databases, ETL tools, and open source tooling.

The go-to-market strategy for a data infrastructure company requires a deep understanding of the data engineering landscape. A company must build something useful, sell it to customers, and eventually build a replicable strategy.

Sean Knapp is the CEO of Ascend, a company that builds Apache Spark-based data pipelines that connect APIs, data lakes, and data warehouses together to enable data applications. Sean joins the show to talk about the process of building a data infrastructure company, and his lessons building Ascend.

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Transcript

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